The Charlotte News

Monday, July 7, 1947

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President, in a written message, renewed his request that Congress pass legislation to admit a "substantial number" of Europe's displaced persons into the United States. He stated that the Allied armies of occupation had repatriated about seven million people, but that a million remained in the Western zones of Germany, Austria, and Italy, not wanting to return home for fear of political persecution. Most were from the Ukraine, Poland, and Yugoslavia. Countries of Western Europe and Latin America had already admitted many of these refugees and, he urged, it was thus incumbent on the U.S. to do likewise. The newly established International Refugee Organization could, he said, help to re-establish the refugees.

Czechoslovakia was rumored to be ready to accept the British-French invitation extended to 22 nations to meet in conference beginning July 12 to discuss the needs of each participating country under the Marshall Plan and to coordinate the resources of the countries to help themselves and reduce the necessity of aid. Poland was still studying the matter. Six nations had accepted the invitation and eight others were expected to accept.

The Atomic Energy Commission declared that a rumor printed in a Paris newspaper of a new, more powerful atomic bomb was false. The story had described the supposed bomb as capable of leaving an eleven-mile diameter crater.

The Army Air Force flew 21 B-29's from Salina, Kans., to Frankfurt, Germany, on what was described as a routine training mission. It was the first time that the Superfortresses had crossed the Atlantic.

Josephus Daniels, former Secretary of the Navy under President Wilson during World War I, stated in a letter to the House Armed Services Committee that universal military training was "archaic" in an era where infantry were in third or fourth place in modern atomic warfare. He believed that such training would create a military caste, above the average citizen, as in the days of Napoleon's France and of Germany under the Kaiser and Hitler.

John L. Lewis failed to reach agreement with the Northern coal mine operators and the steel companies with captive mines to avert an industry-wide strike the following day. Negotiations were to resume later in the day and continue through midnight. The operators represented 40 percent of the industry. The basic terms of the agreement had been reached, but problems were encountered in the final drafting.

American Federation of Musicians president James Caesar Petrillo stated to the House Labor Subcommittee that he might seek to ban radio network broadcasts when the current contract with the union expired at the end of the year. At that point, he said, the union might produce its own records. He wanted the stations to have to employ the musicians directly, to play the music live, as recordings had resulted in unemployment among musicians.

Hey, go out and work for a living for a change, pal. Turn off the music. We don't care. It will make for nice quietude for a change. We don't need that tinny-sounding garbage, with trite lyrics on trite tunes worthy of a dog in heat. Get it out of here. Cut off your nose to spite your face and go away, you stupid, overpaid, arrogant little punk.

Before adjournment on July 26, the Congress had on its agenda the Army-Navy merger bill, the new, identical version of the previously vetoed and sustained tax bill, and a bill to allow discharged servicemen to cash early their 1.8 billion dollars in terminal leave bonds, after September 1. The tax bill was expected to pass the House the following day and then head for the Senate.

In New York, a block from Times Square, a suspected robber was shot to death and a patrolman seriously wounded in a shootout on a crowded bus on 42nd Street. The man had allegedly robbed a jewelry store of $10,000 in jewels and was chased by the patrolman onto a bus with 40 passengers. The man then used a passenger as a shield and told the officer he was going to let him have it, whereupon he opened fire and the officer returned fire. No passengers were wounded in the exchange. The man had a disabled veteran's card in his wallet and a Florida driver's license. He had taken a nine-carat diamond ring and two other pieces of jewelry from the Prudential Pledge Co.

A 15-year old boy from Albany, N.Y., was sentenced to serve twenty years to life in Clinton Prison for hanging his eight-year old playmate on March 15. He had pleaded guilty to second degree murder after indictment for first degree murder. The boy had admitted the killing and said that he hung the boy on an impulse.

The engineer for the Charlotte Planning Board, in a speech before the Engineers Club at the Ship Ahoy, described the needs of the city to include crosstown thoroughfares, opening of cul-de-sacs, and provision of more parking space to alleviate the congestion in the downtown area. He cited unregulated growth during the previous 75 years as the major fault in planning.

A letter from the Duke of Mecklenburg in the French occupation zone of Germany had been received by the Mecklenburg County Commissioners, seeking information on the county. He had just become aware of the existence of Mecklenburg County and Charlotte, named, he assumed correctly, after Queen Charlotte, wife of King George III and sister of his great-great-grandfather, the Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.

Friend, be careful at the turn of the next story. Grip your seat tightly and breathe, breathe, breathe, slowly.

In Greenville, S.C., a woman on Buncombe Street reported seeing a ball of fire in the western sky at around dusk on July 3. She was certain that it was neither a rocket nor a shooting star. She was reluctant to call it a flying saucer. She saw a blaze on the end of the ball of fire and observed that it was too large to be a shooting star. It disappeared over the horizon about a mile from her house. No one else had reported any such sightings.

But, friend, be careful tonight as you drive home, should you be in the area of Greenville. And should you see any little green people around Greenville, be sure and report it immedately to the local authorities that they might investigate the matter and determine the truth. Do not approach the little green people, or if they be red. Be wary of anyone, in fact, whose skin appears to you in primary colors. Report all suspicious activity to the local authorities. Do not become a statistic by taking this report lightly.

Since June 25, reports had come from 39 states, including Massachusetts, of sightings of the strange objects, described as flying saucers.

A man at Kingsport, Tenn., stated that he had been seeing such objects for two years but did not mention it because of the ongoing work at Oak Ridge on the atomic bomb.

Internationally known explosives inventor Lester Barlow opined that the objects were missiles being tested by the Government, explaining why most sightings were in the West.

The Harvard University Observatory stated that it had made no observations of the objects and its photographic equipment had not recorded them during the nights.

Howard Blakeslee, Associated Press science editor, explains that all objects appear nearly round from a distance close to the limit of a person's field of vision. The descriptions of the flying saucers, he said, fit the tricks of the eyes which could occur under such viewing circumstances, varying with light and weather.

He reports that he had seen flying saucers near his home on Long Island Sound for several years. They were light being reflected from the fuselages of approaching airplanes, which soon afterward appeared. He believed the movements described to fit those of distant airplanes.

Friend, don't be fooled by this obviously obscurantist attempt to pollute the truth with speculative "explanation". Any dumbbell could discern the difference between a reflection of an airplane and a flying saucer. Just wait until he and these other naysaying skeptics get picked up by one.

Do as the sign said at the Newport News, Va., Peninsula Airport: "Two thousand feet vertical and horizontal clearance required between aircraft operating from this field and any 'flying saucers'."

Hal Boyle will put all doubts to rest tomorrow.

Stay tuned.

July corn futures continued a sharp rise on the Chicago Board of Trade, moving up as much as 4.25 cents during the morning to a record high of $2.17 per bushel. A private forecast of a reduced crop for 1947 was a major contributing factor to the bullish trend.

On the editorial page, "On Two Levels of Diplomacy" finds the failure of the recent conference at Paris between the foreign ministers of Britain, France, and Russia, after the Russians expressed disapproval of the Marshall Plan and went home, to be confirmation of the long understood fact that cooperation between Russia and the West was not possible. But official recognition of the fact at least was refreshing.

The State Department had urged Russia to reconsider its stance, a move supported by the New York Times on the ground that the ball thus was placed in Russia's court.

While there would now be a stable policy for the reconstruction of Europe's shattered economies, the Marshall Plan, as with the Truman Doctrine, was an admission of failure of cooperation and a return to balance-of-power politics, which had as a necessary concomitant militarism.

So, the diplomatic victory was also a defeat, and that two-edged sword needed to be borne in mind.

"The Dreams of the Young" tells of a study by the State Planning Board finding that high school boys in the state had too lofty goals, 28.9 percent seeking professional status, while only a tenth of those would achieve it, and only one percent desiring to work in the three major industries, furniture manufacturing, textiles, and tobacco, work to which a quarter were bound.

The solution was to inaugurate vigorous vocational guidance in the schools to attenuate the lofty goals held by those not likely to attain them and replace the dreams with more realistic notions.

The piece favors instead conforming the economic opportunities in the state to the lofty goals of the young. Vocational guidance, while necessary, should not limit economic opportunity.

In cold terms, no one should be saying: "Son, you're a loser. Becoming a brain surgeon is out. Learn how to operate a carding machine and forget about it."

"No, we can't start discussing our mothers. You must face reality, boy. You are a loser."

"I am aware that you can carve meat better than the principal in the school cafeteria and that you expertly carve your family turkey every Thanksgiving. But the skill levels to which you aspire require more."

"No, stop that. I did not accuse you of setting fires. You must learn to listen attentively and discern the words. This is another reason why brain surgery is out. What if your chief anesthetist said during surgery, 'Doctor, the patient is out and you may proceed,' and you were to think that she said, 'I caught her facing doubt and threw away your loco-weed'? Such misinterpretation would not serve the public well, even if on replay of the words you decided to leave the theater. Face facts. You are a loser."

Should you have been slighted by a guidance counselor, perhaps take some solace from the fact that we have heard that a group of them at some school in the past were standing outside the school after a fire drill and when the bell had rung for all to return to class, one of their number turned to the others and was overheard to inquire, as the students filed past, "Do you think we can go back in, now?"

"Inverse View of the GOP Nomination" tells of Congressional Democrats voting three to one in a Pageant Magazine poll for Senator Arthur Vandenberg as the Republican they least wanted to be the opposing party nominee in 1948. Governor Dewey was a distant second least favorite. They discounted the candidacy of Mr. Dewey because he had run and lost in 1944, historically a death knell to political chances—as it would continue until 1968.

While it views the result as unimportant, it notes that Senator Vandenberg was not yet out of the race for the Republican nomination, even if most pundits were viewing it to be down to a race between Governor Dewey and Senator Taft, with the former leading.

A piece from the Hickory Record, titled "The Disfranchised Piedmont", tells of a former Democratic National Committeeman in North Carolina taking issue with the power arrangement in the Legislature, which virtually deprived the Piedmont of its proportional representation in state Government, in favor of the Eastern part of the state. It resulted, he said, in minority control of the state.

The piece agrees and hopes a change would take place.

A piece by W. T. Bost of the Greensboro Daily News discusses the bill introduced in the 1947 session of the State Legislature to make it illegal to teach in the public schools that the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence was less than authentic, despite credible evidence that it was apocryphal, at least insofar as it predating the Declaration in Philadelphia by over a year.

"As North Carolina people have gone so far as to suggest that Jefferson plagiarized the Mecklenburg declaration, it would seem to be in order to make July Fourth the apocryphal anniversary of our independence or the real anniversary of our apocryphal independence."

He suggests proving the Mecklenburg instrument authentic and the Philadelphia copy spurious. Former President Jefferson, in 1819, had written a letter, as uncovered by Josephus Daniels, in reply to a letter from former President John Adams accepting the Mecklenburg declaration as authentic. The piece quotes from the letter, in which Mr. Jefferson regarded the instrument as spurious, that its supposed proof being recorded in a sheet called the Raleigh Register had no backing from the time and appeared to be a fabricated newspaper and piece, though Mr. Jefferson admitted of it not being a certainty. Other historians had not included it in their prior histories of the state. The former President and principal author of the Philadelphia instrument concluded that it was his belief, until shown the contrary, that the Mecklenburg document was wanting of authentication.

Mr. Bost concludes that it would have served Virginia and Mr. Jefferson right had North Carolina celebrated May 20 and skipped July 4. And the three North Carolinians present in Philadelphia at the signing of the Declaration might have claimed never to have heard of it had they known then how Mr. Jefferson would treat the Mecklenburg instrument. It finds it no wonder that the late Bishop John C. Kilgo, president of Trinity College for 16 years, had referred to Thomas Jefferson as a "monster".

Drew Pearson tells of Senator James Murray of Montana calling at the White House the prior week to speak with the President about the flooding of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, proposing that the President urge anew his support for a Missouri Valley Authority on the order of TVA. The President agreed that ordinarily, the timing would be good, but that he did not see how there would be any hope of passage in the 80th Congress with its fiscal conservatism at work. They would kill off TVA, he said, if they could. The President nevertheless promised to consider the proposal.

He next tells in detail of a conference between Secretary of State Marshall and a Congressional delegation, including Senator Claude Pepper of Florida and Congressman Emanuel Celler of New York, discussing the Palestine situation, urging a strong statement by the Secretary to erase the idea that the U.S. was duplicitous in its actual dealings with Palestine relative to its stated policy, as charged in Bartley Crum's recently published work, Behind the Silken Curtain. Secretary Marshall stated that he had not read the book, but would tolerate no duplicity while Secretary.

Mr. Celler wanted him to commit to a specific policy on immigration of displaced persons, providing the number of such persons who ought be accepted by each nation. Secretary Marshall would not assent to such a policy statement or any other firm public stand on the matter until the U.N. investigatory commission in Palestine completed its work and issued a report, lest it appear that the U.S. was circumventing the U.N.

Samuel Grafton tells of various canards making the rounds. One was that prices were high because America was shipping so much abroad. When one countered that only seven percent of the nation's food was being shipped, the response was that it was the top seven percent which caused prices to rise. When the determined dialectician stated that Americans were consuming 25 percent more food than before the war and thus had room to sacrifice, the equally determined response was that the country had no reason to do that for the socialists of England.

Another was that Russia was the cause for Europe needing aid, so that America would go broke. When one countered that the Russians were not supportive of American aid, the response was that the aid program was just another version of the New Deal, with relief given to Europe.

Embroidery could be added to the kernel of truth in these myths to make them major issues in the 1948 campaign. Nowhere would cancellation of price control be blamed for high prices. Rather, it would be shoved onto foreign aid.

A similar argument was made with respect to cars as with food.

Congressman Howard Buffett of Nebraska had recently appeared on the radio program, "American Forum of the Air", and replied to a question whether America should stop foreign aid to halt the rise in prices, that he believed it ought be slowed. When someone said slowing of aid would not change much, he added that it should be "slowed very sharply".

Joseph & Stewart Alsop discuss the potential of merger of AFL and CIO. Most qualified observers thought it a long shot but both labor organizations were united in their resentment of Taft-Hartley. Mutual hatred of a common object always bound people together.

The apparent victory of John L. Lewis in arranging a liberal coal contract without a strike was a triumph which could make him the leader of a combined AFL and CIO, always his goal. David Dubinsky, head of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union, was supportive of Mr. Lewis for the position.

It appeared also that CIO president Philip Murray might be willing to take a backseat to Mr. Lewis, as Mr. Murray had been in that position previously when vice-president of the UMW.

The Communists, supported by Moscow, appeared also to favor merger, even if they might not fare well under Mr. Lewis or Mr. Dubinsky, both of whom would wish to root them out.

All of these factors suggested merger. The irony of Taft-Hartley might be that it would produce sufficient common strategy between the rival organizations that they would conjoin.

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